Wednesday, September 22, 2010

RATIONALIZING SOCIALISM'S FAILURE

The leaders of Cuba are about to embark on a program of reform, government downsizing, and privatization of some industries and services. How do I know? Because I’m such a faithful reader of the Marxist media. According to the online organ of the Party of Socialism and Liberation, the Cuban reform plan doesn’t signify a failure of socialism. It is merely a reaction to American perfidy:

The single biggest and most enduring problem for Cuba, however, is the unceasing war waged against the heroic island nation by the most powerful Empire in history. So, what can we do here? It is by intensifying the revolutionary struggle of the working and poor people in the United States against the Empire that we can render the greatest service to our inspiring and steadfast counterparts in the land of Marti.

Regarding Cuba’s past, limited expansions of private farming and enterprise, you’ll have to read the PSL’s rationalizations in order to believe them. And as for the future, somehow I doubt the pathetic kleptocracy running the island will do anything to endanger its own power — or its subsidies from Hugo Chávez.

At the rate Chavez is beggaring his own country, you'll have to wonder how long Venezuela's communist thugs can subsidize Cuba's. You can bet that it will be America's fault that Venezuela's socialist paradise falls apart, too.

Funny how the left keeps rationalizing socialism's failure to produce wealth. Admittedly, they are rather good at redistributing it (much of it into the leaders' pockets),so that everyone is poor; but the goons in charge just haven't grasped the concept that wealth production is just not something the government is able to do; and it gets harder and harder as time goes by to "redistribute" nothing--which is what you get when you demonize and/or kill off (literally and figuratively) those individuals who actually create wealth in your society.

Over the last hundred years, the letist apologists for socialism and communism have had to face disappointment after disappointment as they watched the unraveling of every Marxist prophecy about the demise of capitalism; and then had to deal with multiple socialist nightmares in the real world; instead of the fantasy dreamworld they imagined. In both theory and practice, socialism's battle for supremacy with capitalism had been decisively lost.

In every empirical test in the real world, capitalism has worked better than socialism and once and for all completely debunked all the original Marxist claims about socialism's supposed superiority.

--Instead of exploiting people, capitalism has empowered them, while socialism made them poor, miserable, and oppressed.--Instead of increasing poverty, capitalism has mostly eliminated it. The rich get richer indeed; but the poor get richer, too. Under socialism’s yoke, everyone became poorer except the corrupt.--Instead of being more humane and peaceful, socialism has almost always deteriorated into dictatorship and oppression; and then became aggressive and violent toward other countries

But the confrontation between capitalism and socialism in the last century was only the most recent in a long series of historical battles between the forces of freedom and individualism on the one hand; and the forces of tyranny and collectivism on the other.

We are in the middle of a battle in that long war right now in the U.S. The forces of tyranny and collectivism have a rather bland--even benevolent-- face here (except for the botoxed and artificial features of Nancy Pelosi, who looks rather scary). But under the mask, the Obama's Pelosi's and Reid's of today are not very different from the Castro's or the Chavez's in fundamental principles--or rather the lack of them. They embrace the same discredited ideas and disguise them with the do-gooder's grotesque smile. The joke is on you.

The ideas they espouse all perfectly fit into that tired old Marxist framework that thinks only in terms of the dialectical of "oppressed vs. oppressors". This framework allows the left to continually fan the fires of class warfare and victimhood and thus become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Socialism and Communism cannot fail--they are merely victims of a vast capitalist/American/Jewish conspiracy!

This is a remarkably convenient intellectual and moral escape clause for any ideology that doesn’t actually possess any solutions to real world problems.

And, this is the essence of the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of today's political left. To make their systems even function minimally, they have to steal ideas from those they despise (think of the gun put to John Galt's head in Atlas Shrugged where the statists try and force him to save them from the consequences of their own policies). These bozos want to have the wealth and eat it too.

How long do you suppose it will take for this idea to catch on with our very own bozos in the White House and Congress? Not long, I suspect, because they fundamentally believe that YOU belong to the STATE. So, for them it's just the natural extension of what they're doing now; no big deal.

And when these financial wizards, like Fidel, run out of other people's money to spend, they will keep on rationalizing that it wasn't their fault; it was capitalism's; it was America's; it was the Jews; it was...George Bush's!... and so on and so forth ad infinitum.

The only people they won't blame is themselves; and the only ideas they won't demonize are their own. They are the undead; and they won't ever die--and this war will continue-- until once and for all a stake is hammered into the heart of their misbegotten ideas.